Steal my 10% Body Fat System

True Transformation Podcast

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Josiah Novak: Welcome back to the True Transformation Podcast. It is your host, Josiah Novak, owner and founder of TheTrueTransformation.com, where we help you take fitness and use it to improve every part of your life. We also help you do things you never thought possible when it came to your health and fitness with simple, sustainable, and enjoyable systems.

If this is your first time listening, I appreciate you tuning in. If you've been listening for a while, thank you so much for continuing to come back and share some time with me.

Today's podcast is actually brought to you by none other than our good friends over at Manly. Manly is my new personal supplementation and health and wellness provider. Let me explain how it works. It's really simple. You take your blood work, which you do yourself. I know it sounds crazy, but they send you a do-it-yourself bloodwork kit. You prick your finger a few times, squeeze some drops of blood on a little card, and then send that card back to Manly. They take your bloodwork and, along with a pretty thorough survey of about 100 questions about how you feel and how you perform, they give you a custom supplementation protocol.

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Today's podcast is also brought to you by none other than our True Transformation 3M System. If this is your first time listening, congrats, because you're about to uncover the most simple and streamlined system there is on the face of the earth when it comes to dialing in your health and fitness. We call it the 3M System, and it is a three-step process to mastering health and fitness and going after goals you never thought possible.

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Alright, today, I want to talk to you about copying my 10% body fat model. What does that even mean? Well, staying lean is important for me. I call it 10% body fat, but it might mean 12% body fat for you, it might mean 14% body fat. It means a healthy body fat percentage for your goals.

Now, why is 10% body fat a healthy body fat percentage for me? Well, because right now I'm in the performance phase of my fitness career, where I'm going after a lot of really challenging goals that involve performance. Being lean is crucial because a lot of these performance-based goals involve a lot of running. So, I need to maintain a lower percentage of body fat in order to be lighter on my feet. But I also have a balancing act—I can't get too lean because that requires really going into a pretty hefty calorie deficit, and that's also not good for performance. So, 10%, let's call it 12%, is the range that I like to live in most of the time these days.

The model that I've implemented and installed in my life comes with a lot of takeaways that you can utilize with your own goals to make staying at a healthy body fat percentage and also getting to a healthy body fat percentage very attainable for you, especially with all the things you have going on—from your family to your work, to just your fun and social and travel life. It's a lot to balance. It's a lot to juggle.

How do we get there? What model can we follow? That's what today's podcast is all about. I know I mentioned the 3M System already, and the 3M System never goes out of style for me. It's always a part of my planning. It's always the foundation when it comes to building out my systems: Movement, Muscle, Meals. Those are the three things that I need to take care of. But obviously, those buckets look a little different depending on the goal and depending on what you're going after. But I think the most important thing is to understand that those three buckets will always be a part of your planning. You're never going to avoid any one of those three things. It's just how much of each one will you worry about? Do you need to be more strict with your calories? Do you need to be a little less strict?

To me, maintenance is the name of the game. That's really what we're all after. We want to get to a place where we're maintaining a healthy body fat percentage. That's the whole idea of health and fitness. I see so many people doing things that are just not sustainable. What I'll encourage you to think about is how you get to your goal is really important because how you get there is often going to determine how you stay there, or if you're even able to stay there.

Let's face it. I see a lot of guys online talking about how they're at elite levels because they got abs, they got ripped. But what you don't know is that how they got there was not sustainable. So, they quickly lose that level of body fat. They quickly go back to higher body fat levels, not healthy body fat levels, and they start to really struggle to maintain their health and fitness because they got to quote-unquote "elite levels" in a really unhealthy way. They may have gotten there somewhat fast, somewhat quickly, but they quickly lose the results.

That's really, really important to understand because, at the end of the day, anybody with enough motivation, discipline, desire, and just putting the blinders on and having tunnel vision can get abs, or at least get some semblance of abs for a period of time—a day or a week or two. But can you stay at a healthy body fat percentage for the rest of your life? Most of the time, people struggle with that because they're going from one extreme to the next.

The first thing about my model that you can copy is that I do things that answer a very serious question: Can I see myself doing these things for a long period of time? The things that I do, the way I fill up my 3M System—can I see myself doing them for a long period of time? If the answer is no, then I definitely want to reconsider. It doesn't mean I have to do the same things forever. I might have periods where I am in a pretty heavy calorie deficit, but there's always things about the process that I can see myself doing for a long period of time. Namely, the food that I'm eating—do I like the food that I'm eating? Can I see myself eating these types of meals, these types of foods? Can I see myself doing these types of workouts? Can I see myself training this frequently for a long period of time? Oftentimes, the answer is yes. Whenever it's no, then the next question I ask is, do I have a plan to exit the strategy?

There are some unsustainable things that I even do. Getting ready for a marathon, like I'm doing right now—I just started my marathon prep. It's going to get very unsustainable very, very soon. I'm not going to be able to run—at least I don't want to run, I could run if my life depended on it, I guess—but I don't want to run five days a week. But I'm already at four, and I know it's pretty soon going to be five. We may have periods of time where I'm running six days a week to get the volume up, where I might be biking three days a week and running four days a week. But there's going to be a lot of cardio—more than I want to do for a long period of time. This prep is only going to be 16 weeks, roughly, and then I'm on to the next thing. So, it's not forever. Do I have an exit plan? What am I going to do when I'm done with the marathon? Am I going to go back to zero cardio? No. I have other goals after the marathon that involve some cardio, so I'm not going to put my body in a place where I rebound really, really fast.

Not to knock 75 Hard because, at the end of the day, it was created as a mental challenge. It's turned into a physical fitness challenge by people who didn't make the challenge. It's used by a lot of so-called fitness experts to crash diet and get themselves in shape very quickly, and then they go back to being people who pretend to be in shape. But at the end of the day, it is a challenge mentally, and cool, if you want to challenge yourself mentally, go for it. But doing two workouts a day for 45 minutes, one outside, never having anything bad that's not on your meal plan, no alcohol, no snacks, no nothing—nothing enjoyable, just eating the same foods, hitting your calories, following a perfect diet every single day for the rest of your life—is not sustainable. Could it be done for 75 days? Of course. But what's your plan after? What are you going to transition to after? Is it going to be 75 Harder? Is it going to be 75 Eat Whatever I Want? Or is it going to be 75 Maintain? Maybe 75 years maintain instead of 75 days?

Either way, you gotta have an exit strategy. That's the first thing. We gotta make sure we can answer those questions: Is it sustainable? Hopefully, the answer is yes. If it's not, do we have an exit strategy? Do we have a plan to get to something that is sustainable, is maintainable? If you don't, man, you gotta get that in place. Mentally, you gotta know where you're headed.

Now, what's the next thing? This is a really important concept: checkpoints throughout the year—meaningful days throughout the year that I set on my calendar that I want to have a fitness goal attached to. These days are meaningful to me. They could be birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, but I have a fitness goal attached to these times so that I have focus for shorter periods of time but long-term add up to the bigger and greater goal, which in this case is maintaining a healthy level of body fat, looking a certain way, feeling a certain way, performing a certain way. I gotta have different goals though, because I don't know anything about how you operate, but I like to have different things that I go after.

It's why our program, you know, it's not just about losing fat. That's phase one—let's get your body fat down to a healthy level. Phase two is let's go after other things. Let's go after maybe really lean body fat, like unsustainable levels, you know, do a photoshoot. Or maybe it's a reverse diet, or maybe it's building muscle, or maybe it's a performance goal. We have so many different performance goals that we could go after. Maybe you want to do a Hyrox, maybe you want to do a Deka Fit. There are a lot of different things that you could decide you want to do. That's why fitness is such a beautiful thing. But you gotta plan your year so that you have different things that you're tackling and you're not chasing ten different things at once.

You might have a vacation coming up and you say, "Alright, I got a vacation in 12 weeks. So the next checkpoint is my vacation. And when I get to that checkpoint, I want to have accomplished X, Y, and Z or just X." It's a really cool and fun strategy because it keeps things interesting. Since you're already motivated to get to that date—because these dates are meaningful, remember, a birthday, an anniversary, a trip, a work trip, whatever it is—it's already something on your calendar that you care about. So, if you attach it to a fitness goal, well, now you have extra layers of caring about that goal. You have extra discipline because you're like, "Well, I have an important day coming up. I want to have achieved something before that." This works really well.

For me, I always have another checkpoint day, usually every three months, sometimes shorter. Sometimes it's every eight weeks for a period of time, sometimes it's every three to four months. But I got, you know, a few of these throughout the year keeping me in the game mentally and allowing me the opportunity to never fall off because I always got something else to go after. These goals vary, you know, it's not always fat loss, it's not always Hyrox, it's not always building muscle. Sometimes it's a marathon, sometimes it is getting ready for a photoshoot, sometimes it's adding strength or muscle, sometimes it's just maintaining my fitness and my weight for a period of time. And that keeps things really, really on point for me personally and physically.

So, the model so far, as you can see, is mostly related to the mental side because that's the biggest side, in my opinion. You have to have an identity. We talk about it in our program called Identity Design, but you gotta really design your world around who you want to be. And it serves all the people you want to serve, and most importantly, it takes care of you because taking care of you is important. If the CEO of a company is struggling, the company is going to struggle. So, you gotta take care of you. And it's not selfish; it's selfless because you do need to do the work to take care of you so that you can show up for other people and help them take care of themselves. That's just how it works, man.

So, a lot of this stuff is mental, but I will talk a little bit about the tactical side. What I'll say is this, you have to strike the right balance between doing the things you know you need to do even when you don't feel like doing it, which for me is most of the time. I call it the 90-10 rule. Most people say 80-20; I call it 90-10. I think to really be deeply involved in fitness and to really have a big importance and emphasis placed on your health, you need to be dialed in 90% of the time. 10% of the time, it's all good.

I just went on vacation to Italy for a week. It was amazing. Every day, I would do something active, whether it was a run or walking a lot, but I ate whatever I wanted. I ate whatever the heck I wanted to eat, and that was ice cream—gelato, as they call it—that was pasta, pizza, you know, lemon sorbet. I drank a lot of alcohol, more than I've probably drunk in the past year combined because the wine over in Italy is of unbelievable quality. It's just paradise if you like food and wine, which I do. So, I enjoyed the heck out of it. But that's a week. There's 52 weeks in a year, right? So, one week out of 52 weeks, I go out and do whatever I want. Now, there's probably a few more spaces in my calendar for doing whatever I want, even if it's not the best for me, but it's the best for me in that timeframe because it's keeping my mental health in check. I come back, I have no desire to drink, I have no desire to eat pizza, I have no desire for the gelato. It was good, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. And now I'm back to doing what I know is good for me.

But you gotta have that balance. I'm not perfect; I don't want to be perfect. Perfection is a myth anyway. You can never be perfect. You might have stretches of time where you're perfect, but part of my model is that it's 90-10. 10% of the time, I eat what I want to eat. Let's just pretend, for example, it's, let's say, 28 meals a week—four a day, seven days a week. Two to three of those, I'm gonna eat what I want. Two to three, I'm gonna eat what I want. I know if I do that and the rest of the time I eyeball quantities because I don't really count calories anymore—I've done enough of that. I earned the right to eyeball, but I eat proteins, healthy carbs, fruits, vegetables, you know, I make really good meals that taste really good—tacos, pizzas, but they're all with healthier ingredients. I hit calories that I know are gonna keep me where I need to be. But then two or three meals a week, I eat what I want. And it might be as awful for you as McDonald's, just being honest. Or it might be a nice dinner out with my wife where we order appetizers and drinks and, you know, we have dessert. It might be ordering ice cream with my kids. It might be, you know, watching the UFC fight and ordering pizzas and just crushing, you know, three or four slices of pizza. That's part of the balance that I strike that keeps me healthy, keeps me lean, but allows me to maintain this lifestyle.

You don't want to wake up every day going, "I can't wait for this to be over," because I promise you it's gonna be over quick. You're gonna go back to what you were doing that you enjoyed. And if you don't find enjoyment in this routine, that's why, you know, if you don't find enjoyment in this routine, it's gonna be a short-lived routine. But it's, once again, why I stress Identity Design. You have to design who you want to be. You don't have to settle. You don't have to feel stuck. It's not too late. You can change. For me, I've crafted a life that I really do love. I don't mean like I have no challenges and struggles like a normal human. Of course, I do. From business struggles to family struggles to marriage struggles, like we all have them. But when it comes to my fitness, you know, I want that to be a part of my life that is enjoyable most of the time. It's a part of me that I look forward to. And so, my model includes things that I love. Sometimes I have weeks where, yeah, I'm at 80-20, you know, but most of the time, it's 90-10. Most of the time, I'm pretty spot on 90% of the time. And if I ever feel myself slipping, you know, I just remind myself, I look at numbers, I say, "Okay, cool. You know, I felt this past week, I wasn't on top of my game. I missed a couple of workouts I don't normally miss. I had a few extra meals or snacks that I normally don't have. I don't need to be perfect, but I do need to get that ratio back to where I need to be." And that ratio will look different for everybody. You gotta find what that looks like for you. And, you know, it's not going to be like me. It may be tighter than me. It may be less tight, more flexible for you. It really just depends on you and what you absolutely want.

So, that, my friends, is the model. Your next step is simple. You, me, or one of my team members need to hop on a call and we need to figure out what model is going to work best to help you hit your goals and not just hit the goals that you want to hit but hit those and then go out and crush goals that you never...